The Trouble With Princes

The man I love is far from perfect.

Perfect, it should be noted, is a rather dangerous word. Perfectionism often keeps us from completing that which we have set out to accomplish, for the fear that it will not be taken as we'd like it to. Some would argue that this notion tarnishes the very definition of perfection, in the same sense that attempting to control beauty inherently will end up corrupting it in its essence. Perfection is a luxury afforded to those who have the privilege of choosing their truths; confectionization of the unsavory:

An artificial coating, sprinkled liberally over the reality of what went in the batter.

My grandmothers, on both sides, were what you could call Stepford wives of their respective generations. Perfect hair, perfect homes, perfect husbands in varying yet constant stages of dissatisfaction. High flyers of high standing, each held highly in regard within each their own circles. Each demanding more from the ones they called 'love' than they ever expected of themselves.

'The ones they love' seems a rather strange way to address them, given the definition of the way their 'loves' were cared for. There is no doubt in my mind that they did care for them. Bills were paid, mouths were fed, and homes were bought, and furnished, filled with all the symbols of success.

But did they love them?

I think of other systems in which people are looked after, where roofs are erected overhead, timely meals provided, and where a bed and bath are often readily available, if to inconsistent modicums of frequent comfort.

Systems like senior care, hospitalization, and imprisonment.

By definition, one can accept that the people who are governed by these systems are, to some extents and purposes, cared for. But are they loved? Does the inmate receive his stale daily bread with gratitude, knowing with esteemed conviction that his warden loves him? Do the elderly whose bedpans are changed, and bodies sponged, to the cursing of nurses and pulling of noses, feel that they are treated with love in this exchange? Is the providing of basic necessities, equal to care, indicative of love or merely scraping at the bottom of the barrel of bare minimums?

A man who provides for his family, or a woman who nourishes her children, surely cares for them enough to keep them living. But if a man abuses, or disrespects his wife, and a woman is conditioned to accept this as love, what does that show them about each other? What does it teach their children? Is a child who is raised to believe that this is what love looks like, now doomed to repeat the toxic patterns of their parents, properly and truly being loved in this dynamic? I would argue no.

That's not to say that I don't think my grandparents loved their children, but I do believe that they could only love them with conditions, because they were conditioned, within the confines of what love had represented itself as, to them, in an earlier age.

My mother is the product of generations of men treating women as inferior, incapable, and infirm. My mother was raised in a good Christian household, where god said it's ok to hit your children and your wife.

Enter Walt Disney.

When I was young, I made everybody call me Princess Jasmine. My grandmother would call and ask "Hi Julia, is your mother home?" to which I would respond "I'm not Julia" and hang up. She learned to navigate our conversations very carefully; refer to my step-father as Aladdin, and my Mother as 'the Genie'. At the time my mother was offended at my casting choices, but I know that we both understand, now, that magic is a much more nurturing and fundamental need than that of a Princess for a Prince. Princes are entitled by nature, spoiled by default, and expected to perform to the specific and exact definition of the word. Their roles are, in essence, performative, until they are promoted to some other designation: A knight in shining armour, or a ruler, or a king (the two are not as mutually inclusive as they seem).

When The Chordettes invoke Sandman, they do not specify the virtues or the values of the princes of their dreams. Their requests are limited to aesthetic attributes, and beg a certain loneliness, both of him and of themselves. Why should this be?

I believe that we are taught, from a budding age, that women are damsels in distress; and that only will our one true prince's kiss emancipate us from ourselves. Why specify the qualities we crave in order to feel loved, when we know in our heart of hearts that someday, our prince will come? All that's left to us is pick a colour and a shape; leaving the rest up to fate, as if it truly were three crones with golden strings and silver scissors, not some patriarchal perpetrator of gender-biased manifest destiny.

Bodies and minds can be colonized, too.

Enter feminism.

I was a feminist, from a very early age, being raised in a home (and a world) where it was necessary. When I say 'was', I do not mean to imply that we no longer have a wanton need for strong and capable women. I mean that it was born out of necessity, alternative to what was deemed the norm. I no longer believe that one gender's domination of the other is normal, any more that I believe it to be a representation of equality. Flipping a coin and placing the other side face down does nothing to conciliate its faces. That is not to say that I don’t believe feminism to be an important tool in dismantling a biased system, which has afforded the patriarchy the luxury of self-governance uber alles, but I do believe that ‘needing’ feminism, rather than employing it radically and with specific timing and intent, further perpetuates the myth that there is a dominant gender. Men need women just as much as women need men, just as much as straight folx need queer and two-spirit folx, in so far as that none of us should need to be needed or deemed necessary in order to be respected, appreciated and understood. We simply are, and that should be enough.

My first boyfriend was a mamma's boy. He resented his father, the eldest of 10 and a domineering, if not hard-working man. His mother was a saint, and not only in his eyes. She truly was the picture of what motherhood looks like, albeit through the lens of the male gaze: Kind, compassionate, caring, patient, strong, but not too strong... Until she left her husband, fled home to Argentina, and reconnected with her own maternal sacred roots. Her son followed her home soon after, and I hear he finally had to get a job and pay his way, at the tender age of far to old to not have learned his lessons yet. I did not thrive within our dynamic. But I do miss Coni.

My first girlfriend was a mamma's girl. She barely knew her father. The man she called Dad was the man her mother married, after they had given her a baby sister. He moved away the second they were old enough to learn from their mother's many uninformed mistakes. What she had actually learned would remain to be seen, exposing itself in drunken fights that spawned from jealous superstitions. I did not thrive here, either.

Now, I can say with confidence that the way you are loved and treated, and the ways in which you deserve to be, are not always synonymous; nor are they dependant on gender, class, or race, or creed (though they can be factors, in the context of imbalance). The s0-called 'perfect' family is no more nuclear or wholesome than the one that has been broken cleanly at the stem, and propagated, or the one that severs itself fully at the root to be replanted in another garden altogether. We deserve to accept the love we require, and reject the kind that mimics what we've known that love could be. We deserve to re-invent it, in the image of our choosing, with the people who are equally determined to break free from the cycles that have limited our self-worth and our expectations.

I am not implying that my own version of love, the one I share with this imperfect man, is the right one. Only that it is the best one I have found so far. It is one that has afforded me, more than any other, an environment in which I am continuously challenged, and changed, and encouraged to grow taller than I ever thought I should. Rather than to reach only as high as lowly branches, and pluck fruit from the ground to place my pouting lips around it, keeping them pursed there, "just-so": I am free to climb as high and mighty as I'd like to, and feast on the supposedly forbidden; knowing that falling is not only an option, but an adventure, and that I will not be going it alone. This is what I wish perfection tasted like to others.

This is what we weave into the fabric of our love.

Imperfect, punctuated and interspersed.